Phishers are constantly devising new ways to trick employees into divulging their credentials. Realistic emails are sent using a variety of ruses to get employees to click on a malicious link, which often aims to obtain Microsoft Office 365 credentials. Office 365 accounts often contain a range of sensitive data, which can be stolen and used for many nefarious purposes.
Recently, a new campaign has been identified targeting businesses that attempts to obtain Microsoft Outlook credentials. The campaign spoofs KnowBe4, a company specializing in security awareness training for employees – Training that helps businesses teach their employees how to recognize a phishing email.
The emails alert the recipient about the impending expiration of a security awareness training module. The recipient is told they only have 24 hours remaining to complete the training. Three links are supplied in the email that appear, at face value, to link to the genuine KnowBe4 website; however, they direct the user to a phishing page on a compromised website where Outlook credentials and personal information are harvested, via a realistic login page for the Outlook Web App.
Instructions are provided for accessing the training outside of the network, with the user instructed to enter their username and password before clicking the sign in button. Doing so, it is claimed, will direct the user to the training module. While the site to which the phishing email links is convincing, the tell-tale sign that this is a scam is the domain. Several different URLs on multiple sites have been used in this campaign, all of which are unrelated to the security awareness training provider. However, busy employees may fail to check the URL before disclosing their credentials.
It is an interesting tactic to spoof a cybersecurity company dedicated to phishing prevention; one that may fool employees into believing the email is genuine. Any company can be spoofed in a phishing campaign. Just because the company offers services to combat phishing does not mean that the email should not be subjected to the usual checks to verify its validity, which is something that should be emphasized in employee security awareness training sessions.
According to Cofense, which analyzed the websites, the compromised sites have recently hosted a web shell that allowed the attackers to upload and edit files. The websites had been compromised since at least April 2020, unbeknown to the site owners. The phishing kit used in this campaign has been loaded onto at least 30 different websites since the campaign commenced in mid-April.
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Employees receive hundreds of emails each week and identifying every phishing email can be a difficult task, especially when many phishing emails are realistic and are very similar to genuine emails that employees receive every day. Security awareness training is important, but it is also essential to implement an advanced spam filtering solution that is capable of blocking virtually all (in excess of 99.9%) malicious emails.
With an advanced spam filtering solution in place – such as SpamTitan – these emails can be blocked at source and will not be delivered to end users’ inboxes, negating the threat.